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Posts Tagged as‘hosted systems’

It is interesting that shortly after I blogged about what really defines cloud computing, Amazon suffered a significant problem that took many of their cloud customers offline for the better part of a day. What does this type of event mean to you if you are considering a cloud-based solution?

First, let me start out by saying no software system is immune from problems. No vendor can guarantee you that their service is going to be available 100% of the time. The good vendors plan redundant systems into their offerings and anticipate issues. Outages come about when particular events are not mitigated or the systems in place don’t work. I’ve been running hosted systems for over ten years now and have been involved in a number of outages. Despite all the best planning, stuff happens. Amazon should not be judged harshly because they had an outage, but rather judged on how they handled the issue and what they do in the future to prevent them.

So if all systems are going to have failures is there anything to learn here? I think there is and you should too if you are considering a hosted application.

The companies that were affected, Foursquare, Quora, Zynga, Reddit to name a few, all provide a hosted service. I have talked about the various ways that they could provide that service in earlier posts, but for now, let’s consider these: hosted out of their corporate offices, co-location at an ISP, managed care at an ISP, or in the cloud. These companies all chose to deliver their solution via Amazon’s cloud. By making that choice, they got a reliable, scalable solution at a cost effective price. Their customers took on an additional level of risk.

Amazon is not in the business of providing the Foursquare application. They are in the business of providing a platform. That platform can host a variety of applications and Amazon has no doubt built out a collection of tools that helps them manage, configure, and deploy that platform. The additional risk is because there is now one more player responsible for deliver the service to customers of Foursquare, Quora, Zynga or Reddit.

On the morning of the outage, I’m sure these companies started to hear from their customers that the service was unavailable. They probably started diagnosing the problem and quickly realized that their software was probably not the cause of the outage. Their response, and rightly so, was to get in contact with their platform provider, in this case Amazon. I can image their frustration at not being able to resolve the problem themselves. It is a time like this, that controlling more of your own destiny, (or more of your own infrastructure in this case), seems like a good idea.

Does this mean that every hosted application company should host their own application or that you should not purchase from a company that doesn’t do their own hosting? No, not at all. But it is something to consider. Do you want to be responsible for ensuring availability?